Market Testing Narrative Or How I Celebrated My Vegetative State of Mind

Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data New York Times May 6, 2013 Front Page (Below the Fold)

Time heals all things. Yesterday while flying back from Seattle I choked down this front pager from the NYT on the notion of using data before the making of a script into a movie. Wounded as the feral writing animal I am the notion of data supplanting the intuition, experience, and imagination incensed the very core of my humanity. Of course the bottom lines of feature films more and more resemble narrative equations that temporarily beguile the viewer, but like so much that is disposable in this moment in the world of commerce the viewing makes us full yet unfulfilled. For the humanity in us requires that we be immersed in experiences we expected yet until this moment had never found. Great narrative is the commitment to explore the cosmos, both its most interior parts and its most eternal. The artist is the indispensable gills that net out of the world’s waters the truths that will yield life sustaining insight.

“Gregor Mendel uncovered the secrets of genetic inheritance with just enough data to fill a notebook. The important thing is gathering the right data, not gathering some arbitrary quantity of it.”

Christopher Mims,

Most Data isn’t Big, and Businesses are Wasting Money Pretending it is

HOT SPRING HONEYMOON

“I am not a sacred type being,”

“Fletcher McCrea,” Keefe argued, “You are just what the good lord needs.”

“I don’t even go to church,”

“Everybody knows that,” Keefe said. “What’s even better there isn’t a soul in town less likely to invoke a sense of the divine.”

“I should stick to what I’m good at.”

“The last thing we need is someone actually pretending to be truly sacred come out here and muck up everything.”